Why the Russian Revolution is Still Important
by Steven Argue
by Steven Argue
Poster
of the counter-revolutionary and anti-Semitic White Army showing their
hatred of Jewish Communist leader Leon Trotsky. The U.S. backed White
Army committed mass murder against Jews and Communists; they murdered
100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone
The
First World War broke out in 1914. It was a showdown between the
capitalist imperialist governments of the world. They were fighting over
which groups of powerful capitalists would control the resources and
labor of the world for their own personal profit. Yet, it was the
working class and peasantry who were sent to fight and die. All total,
the capitalists in their inter-imperialist rivalry slaughtered millions
of
people. About 17 million people were murdered, including 7 million
civilians. Also, about 20 million people were wounded.
At the outbreak of the war Russia was a backward semi-feudal empire ruled by a Tsar where vicious repression, exploitation, and grinding poverty ruled over the lives of the working class and small peasantry. The Russian Orthodox Church taught hatred of the Jews and the Tsarist monarchy routinely helped whip-up pogroms that terrorized and murdered Jews. Likewise, the Russian Empire contained many nationalities whose national sovereignty and languages were outlawed. Lenin called it a prison house of nations. Women’s and homosexual rights were non-existent.
It was the victims of this system who the Tsar sent to the front lines to fight and die for his empire. Yet, all did not go as planned. As happened in a number of other front lines across Europe, the war broke down as soldiers on both sides refused to fight. The agitation of revolutionary socialists within the ranks of the different militaries played a major role in this happening. Many soldiers came to understand that whatever their nationality, they had more in common with each other than they did with the Tsar, Kaiser, King, or President who had sent them to kill each other. Hundreds of miles of Germany’s western front stopped fighting and had to be replaced with new soldiers on both sides in order to get people to start killing each other again. The Russian soldiers, however, took this resistance to the war a step further and went back to overthrow the government that had sent them to fight and die. The Russian Revolution was, in fact, the most successful anti-war movement in world history.
The Russian Revolution went through two stages in 1917. The first, led by the social democratic Mensheviks happened in February, so became called the February Revolution. Almost nothing really improved under the Mensheviks. They started the war back up with Germany, reinstated the shooting of deserters at the front, and, among other things, opposed a needed sweeping land reform for the poor peasantry and a socialization of industry needed for the working class and society as a whole. The Mensheviks, through a program that claimed it was too early for a socialist revolution in Russia, carried out backward pro-capitalist policies.
These Mensheviks, opposed to the leftist agenda of the Bolsheviks, almost lost power in August 1917 due to a rightwing military coup led by General Kornilov. At that point, the survival of the revolution depended, in part, on critical military support from the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks saw this as only a temporary alliance, seeing the critical need to defeat Kornilov, but they also used the situation to arm the working class both to fight against the far right and to prepare for the struggles to come against the Menshevik Kerensky government.
Through patiently winning the working class to their side and military preparations, the Bolsheviks led the workers and peasants to power in a second revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution. This was a revolution that fulfilled its promises. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky ended Russia's involvement in the inter-imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, brought about a sweeping land reform for the peasants, abolished capitalism and created a socialist system that was capable of turning one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of smashing Nazi Germany and rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions to provide everyone with a guaranteed job, housing, education, and health care, brought national rights to oppressed minorities forming republics of ethnic regions, legalizing their languages and providing education in those languages while also giving their economies special help through the planned economy, brought about big advances in women's rights and rights for homosexuals, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.
Naturally, workers around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Internationally the Russian Revolution helped produce a movement that broke away from the opportunist and pro-capitalist Social Democratic socialist parties who supported their own bourgeoisies in the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I and who murdered Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany for their revolutionary opposition to the war and capitalism.
In the United States an important Communist Party was formed out of a split from the reformist Socialist Party of America. That Communist Party, along with the Trotskyist movement that later split off from it, went on to become important leaders in the labor movement of the 1930s, including the ground breaking 1934 Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, and in the formation of the militant industrial CIO union, all of which forced the Roosevelt administration to make some big reforms in favor of the working class which included Social Security, a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, the 40 hour work week and overtime, the outlawing of child labor, and the Works Progress Administration which created two million jobs for the unemployed. The motivation of the ruling class to carry out these programs was to preserve the capitalist system in the face of mass working class and socialist resistance. Before there was militant communist leadership in the unions the working class was mostly just getting its ass kicked, as we are once again today for the same reasons of lacking militant communist leadership. All revolutionary communists and labor militants should study how the communist movement was able to lead strikes and win in the 1930s.
Lenin’s program for the liberation of oppressed nations and races also had a profound effect on the American socialist movement. Before the Russian Revolution, much of the American socialist movement was oblivious to the oppression of blacks. There was a so-called “color-blind” policy in the Socialist Party of America, summed up by Eugene Debs when he said “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.... The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color.” Even worse, other socialists like Victor Berger were openly racist. It was the inspiration of the October Russian Revolution and Lenin's program on special oppression that made American socialists see, in the newly established communist movement, that blacks were doubly exploited and oppressed and that a program of special demands was needed to address black oppression.
Of the role of the USSR, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon later wrote:
“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow – after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races – for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”
Before the movement against Jim Crow segregation had successes, one thinks of the semi-fascist rule of the KKK and Democrat Party in the south. Yet the Communist Party was able to organize a May Day celebration of 20,000 people in Montgomery Alabama in the 1930s. The opening lines of their flyer declared:
“The Birmingham bosses are trying to make slaves of us! They are taking the bread from our mouths! They cut our relief and starve us. They refuse to let us organize as we wish. They refuse to recognize our unions! They persecute and lynch the Negro people! They treat their dogs better than they do the workers!”
The Communist Party had grown in popularity in the south largely due to their struggles for Black freedom with many Blacks joining the party. One of the most famous of the struggles they led was that for Scottsboro Nine. This case, out of Scottsboro, Alabama, was an attempt to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law “justice”. As a result, the Scottsboro youths were not executed, but instead were given long prison sentences. The last defendant was not pardoned until 1976.
Likewise today, it is largely groups who draw our inspiration in part from the Russian Revolution and the early communist movement in America that have campaigned to abolish the racist death penalty and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a result, the movement to free Mumia has forced the state to back down on their attempts to murder him. He does, however, unjustly continue to sit in an American prison hell-hole.
Just as human rights are illusive in the United States, with the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, numerous unjustly charged and prosecuted occupy protesters, and many others, U.S. concerns internationally have nothing to do with human rights either. As Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, U.S. opposition to Castro and support for capitalist butchers like the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship that ruled Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, is based on the economic interests of U.S. imperialism:
“...while the media is most often used as a megaphone to amplify and project the voices of the wealthy and politically powerful, rarely does this same media honestly inform Americans of contemporary history. Because of this, millions of Americans lack the context through with to analyze and understand the basis for confrontations between states. They’re conditioned by the press to look at complex political and social issues through the lens of simplistic personalities. Therefore we speak of ‘Castro’s Cuba’ in the same breath as ‘Saddam’s Iraq’. This is silliness. Conflicts between states are not personal, they’re economic. The US supported a brutal Batista dictatorship there for almost a decade before Cuban rebels drove the regime out. The US, which loves to boast about its ‘human rights campaign’, has supported the most brutal butchers and dictators in the world. Why? Because dictators use their police and arm forces to oppress their own people, to insure that the US had free reign of the nation’s natural resources. Is there any other reason why the US would support butchers like Batista?” — Mumia Abu Jamal 5/2/03
The Cuban revolution, despite its problems, remains a living breathing revolution that must be defended from U.S. imperialism and internal counter-revolution. The Soviet Union, however, did not survive. As Rosa Luxemburg explained:
“It is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.... The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which, it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once.” — Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution” (1900)
Despite the destruction of the USSR, it is essential that revolutionaries learn from that experience just as Marx learned from the destruction of the Paris Commune. In the case of the Paris Commune, workers rose up and took control of their city in 1871, but were viciously attacked by the bourgeoisie. The working class revolution was slaughtered by the bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune was drowned in blood with 30,000 communards murdered in the initial attack and, of the 50,000 people imprisoned, many were executed. Marx saw this slaughter and understood that the workers’ revolution needs to form a workers’ government and army to smash the bourgeoisie and their government. If not, similar tragedies would be repeated.
These were lessons that the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky applied to the USSR. As Emma Goldman observed:
"The Russian experience had taught him [Shatov] that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counterrevolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking a frightful toll of human life. The [imperialist] intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of [White military chiefs] Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a
warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about.” — Emma Goldman quoted in Paul Avrich, “The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution” (1973)
It was from this devastation that the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution was born. The roots of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR laid in the invasion of 14 imperialist armies after the October Revolution, including the United States, who also encircled the USSR and blockaded it economically, while the imperialist backed pro-Tsarist White Army wrecked havoc on the economy by burning crops, destroying factories, and committing mass murder of communists and Jews (100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone).
Despite winning the war against the White Army and imperialist invaders, most of the best communists and other workers died in the war. Bureaucrats with little or no commitment to the goals of the revolution were relied on more and more for the administration of Soviet society as a result of those deaths. That bureaucracy was further corrupted by the economic devastation of war and imperialist blockade which encouraged bureaucrats to steal simply to survive and care for their children. Stalin’s conservative leadership had its social base amongst this bureaucracy which he granted privileges above the working class. And on their behalf, Stalin used repression against the working class to prevent the re-emergence of legitimate workers’ democracy.
The destruction of the Soviet Union started with Stalin’s bloody political counter-revolution against the party of Lenin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Stalin murdered all of the original leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Alexandra Kolantai, and murdered massive numbers of supporters of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition to Stalin. Stalin's political counter-revolution entrenched the power of a conservative and privileged bureaucracy. Some of the gains of the revolution were lost with that. . Abortion was banned. Gay and Lesbian rights, which had been won with the revolution, were overturned. The rights of some nationalities were stomped on as well, such as those of the Ossetians whose Republic was established under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, but was abolished and divided between the Russian and Georgian Republics under Stalin into north and south Ossetia.
Internationally, the USSR no longer played a consistent leading role for the working class because the bureaucracy preferred a policy of sabotaging revolutions in order to gain trade from capitalist countries. In the 1930s Stalin’s policies directly sabotaged the revolutions in Spain, Germany, and China contributed to the victories of the capitalist mass murderers Franco, Hitler, and Chiang Kai-shek.
But one of several gains of the October Revolution that remained was the socialist planned economy that gave the USSR the industrial and political strength to smash Nazi Germany, a capitalist country that brought mass murder to a level of industrial production never seen before or since. The USSR rebuilt after that Nazi invasion devastated the economy and left 30 million citizens of the USSR dead. They rebuilt with a socialist economy that guaranteed everyone a job, housing, education, and health care. It was the positive side of that planned socialist economy, copied in Eastern Europe after the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, that helped inspire the working class of Western Europe to fight for social progress that included some victories, like socialized health care.
Besides smashing Nazi Germany and liberating Europe from fascism, the USSR also lent important material support to the anti-imperialist revolution by doing things like giving the Vietnamese people military aid to defeat the U.S. occupation and U.S. imposed dictatorships that ultimately murdered three million Vietnamese people. Likewise, the USSR broke the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. Not only did the USSR participate in trade with Cuba, but they also gave Cuba fairer prices for their sugar than what was offered on the international capitalist market. In Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere, in a similar way as was done with economic planning within the USSR, the planned socialist economy of the USSR was used to help advance the traditionally poorer countries of the world.
Countries supported by the USSR also advanced women’s liberation while the United States almost always did the opposite. This included U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The USSR tried to defeat U.S. imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, an intervention where billions of U.S. dollars in military aid to the religious fanatics of the mujahideen left a million people dead, toppled a pro-woman government, and put the Taliban in power. The corporate owned media of the United States continues to lie about Afghanistan; peddling the lie that Soviet intervention was an “invasion” despite the fact that the government of Afghanistan (the pro-woman, pro-literacy PDPA government) begged the USSR to send troops to try to defeat the CIA funded religious fanatics of the mujahideen. Other imperialist lies are peddled as well, including the disgusting collection of lies in the Hollywood movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” which, among other things, peddled completely discredited lies about the USSR making bombs to look like toys to blow-up children when they picked them up. Meanwhile, with the continued disastrous intervention of the U.S. imperialists in Afghanistan, the Red Cross warned in 2002 against the U.S. use of brightly colored yellow cluster bombs that appeared to look like toys and were exploding when children picked them up. As usual, the U.S. imperialists are guilty of the crimes they falsely accuse others of committing.
Likewise, the planned economy of the USSR was used to better many of the traditionally oppressed and poorer regions of the USSR by giving them favored investment and lifting them up economically including in the traditionally Muslim regions. Those regions also benefited greatly from the pro-woman / secular policies of the USSR. Nowhere else in the traditionally Muslim world were women better off than in Soviet Central Asia. Women’s access to higher education sometimes regionally produced more woman doctors than men. Compare this to the hell the U.S. created in Afghanistan with the victory of its mujahideen forces where women were stripped of all rights.
Yet, the Soviet people suffered greatly from a lack of political rights as well. After Stalin, the GULAGS that Stalin established, death camps really, were ended. Yet, the left remained unable to express their opinions if they disagreed with the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats. This included labeling political opponents insane and locking them up in mental wards. The U.S. did the same thing with “uppity” women and homosexuals up until the 1960s.
In the time of Gorbachev, the fragility of the deformed workers' state in the USSR was a political question rooted in the privileges of the ruling bureaucracy and the repression the working class had suffered for so many decades. When Yeltsin carried out his disastrous capitalist counter-revolution he created a few wealthy capitalists. At the same time he eliminated guaranteed health care, education, and employment and caused life expectancy to drop by 10 years. Unfortunately, there was not a strong enough working class movement to stop him. This was due to decades of Stalinist repression. But Yeltsin's coup d'etat was a military operation that involved his sending out troops to shoot at protesters and those in the government opposed his coup. It was a counter-revolution led by bureaucrats who thought they could get rich under a capitalist system.
Legitimate Trotskyists opposed Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution as the disaster it was and instead advocated political revolution to defend the socialist planned economy while at the same time sweeping away the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and creating a workers democracy. In the United States we need to both sweep away the capitalist system and create a workers democracy to change a society where the government and economy are presently run strictly by and for the wealthy.
Stalin’s political legacy in the United States includes a fear of socialist revolution. No honest person can see his mass murder and repression attractive. Trotskyists and other left socialists who oppose Stalinism argue that we can have a much much better world if we fight for a system that has both the benefits of socialism and of workers’ democracy.
One of Stalin’s main organizational legacies in the United States is the Communist Party (CPUSA). Their support for the Democrats was Stalin’s policy. That policy, started by Stalin, went against the long proud history of the American working class movement in opposing both the Democrats and Republicans. It went against the policies of both the early Socialist Party and the Communist Party of the United States before Stalin. From Gorbachev to Stalin, that policy of supporting Democrats was never corrected in those many decades while the CPUSA dutifully followed the line given by Moscow. After Stalin’s death, the conservative and repressive bureaucratic caste that Stalin put in power in the USSR by murdering the original leaders of the Russian Revolution actually maintained most of Stalin’s policies, despite denouncing Stalin. That’s why Trotskyists continued to call them and their world followers “Stalinist”.
The Communist Party –USA in the 1980s quit running candidates in order to put their full support behind the Democrats. Politically, left parties like the Communist Party who give their support to the Democrats are only serving to give left cover to the enemies of the working class. Yes, the CPUSA is part of the workers movement and has done some good things, like lead the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. But decades of Stalinist leadership has turned them useless on most questions of labor. They even supported the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) bureaucracy attacks on the militant Hormel Meatpackers of Local P-9 in the 1980s while also supporting Democratic governor Rudy Perpich who sent out the National Guard against the workers.
The Democrats and Republicans are playing a giant game of good cop bad cop with the working class, with Obama being extremely bad but the Republican candidates scaring people into supporting Democrats. Both parties are working together and financed by the same capitalists. Both parties are the paid agents of Wall Street, the banks, oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, austerity, unemployment, repression, student debt, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on climate change. Without organization around a political program that directly challenges the Democrats and Republicans, power will remain in the hands of the capitalists and their two parties. Even “progressive” reforms will remain elusive without a real challenge to their power. It will take a revolutionary party with a Trotskyist program to build the leadership needed to overthrow this system. Likewise, it is likely to take the same to be powerful enough to win any meaningful reforms.
From the propaganda of the U.S. corporate media the lesson of the USSR is that that it “didn’t work” and that all revolutions are similarly doomed. Yet, the only healthy socialist revolution that ever degenerated into Stalinism was the USSR. Every other socialist revolution since has not degenerated, but was instead deformed form birth under Stalinist leadership and the command structure of a guerrilla army that was transformed into the government after taking power (south Vietnam (1975), Cuba (1959), north Vietnam (1954) China (1949), and Yugoslavia (1945)) or under the direct control of Stalin’s Red Army after defeating Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan (1945 - North Korea, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). Each of these revolutions was an improvement in overthrowing capitalist dictatorships, ending the exploitation and control of imperialist capitalist nations, implementing socialist economies, greatly improving women’s rights, and in general meeting human needs like health care, education, nutrition, employment, and housing. China, for instance, doubled life expectancy during Mao’s rule saving the lives of some 408 million people.
But these countries never had workers’ democracies. For instance, Ho Chi Minh murdered thousands of Trotskyists who were also being targeted by the French at the same time. Immediately after taking power, Mao rounded-up all of the known Trotskyists and their friends and families and put them in prison. This was pure Stalinism. No inference of healthy revolutions always degenerating can be drawn from these Stalinist led revolutions. These revolutions didn’t degenerate, they were deformed from birth.
Regarding the existing Stalinist deformed workers’ states of Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea, Trotskyists call for an end to imperialist economic blockades and for the defense of the socialist planned economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution, while at the same time supporting political revolution to overthrow the brutal Stalinist bureaucracies and their privileges in order to bring workers’ democracy. In fact, more and more, in the existing deformed workers states it will take a political revolution to defend what is left of the socialist planned economies from the privatization led by Stalinist bureaucrats.
Trotskyists defended (and defend) the gains of those revolutions from imperialist attacks, including opposing the U.S. economic blockades against North Korea and Cuba and denouncing threats of war against those countries. Still, under our program, Trotskyists support legitimate working class and student uprisings that could produce socialist systems with workers democracy. Historically this has included Trotskyist support for the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring, and the Tiananmen Square uprising of the 1980s. In each case the Stalinists oppressed legitimate working class demands. There are, in fact, rivers of blood between the positions of Trotskyists and Stalinists on those questions, just as there are rivers of blood in the millions of people Stalin murdered, largely to eliminate the Trotskyist left opposition to his rule. Yes, the imperialists have murdered more than the Stalinists, but there are still rivers of blood differentiating Trotskyism from Stalinism.
Stalinist groups in the United States, like the CP, PSL, and WWP, do not have a position in support of political revolution in the Stalinist controlled states. This is why they supported the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square and supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary even though neither uprising was pro-capitalist. Those working class and student uprisings represented hopes for truly socialist systems that would include workers’ democracy. Instead, the CP / PSL / WWP took the side of the Stalinist oppressors. That doesn’t speak well to their visions of socialism. Nor does it speak well to the position they would take if there were similar uprisings against the few remaining Stalinist governments today.
As opposed to Stalinist models, true workers’ democracy includes freedom to form political parties just as long as they don’t get foreign funding and don’t take up arms against the revolution, freedom of the workers’ controlled media, subsidies for any working class press or other media that meet a certain readership criteria, and authentic elections controlled by the working class majority.
Some other nominally “Trotskyist” groups like the ISO, SO, SWP, and Socialist Action have gone to the other end of the extreme, abandoning Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union (which legitimate Trotskyists have applied to other deformed workers states). Trotsky’s defense was clearly one against internal counter-revolution and imperialist attack. Yet all of those groups supported one or more of the following openly counter-revolutionary and imperialist backed movements including the U.S. funded woman hating mujahideen in Afghanistan, the pro-capitalist and CIA backed Solidarnosc movement in Poland that came to power and outlawed abortion and brought unemployment from zero to 50% by eliminating the socialist economy, and Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR that reduced life expectancy by 10 years. As these nominally Trotskyist groups moved away from defending living revolutions from capitalist counter-revolution and imperialist war, they have also in general abandoned advocacy of socialist revolution in the United States. Instead, they tend to see themselves much more as protest pressure groups that prefer anti-communist attempts at sounding legitimate in the court of bourgeois public opinion as opposed to telling the people the truth.
Yet, only socialist revolution will solve society’s problems and save the Earth from the environmental catastrophe of climate change. Study of the Russian Revolution and Paris Commune remain essential ingredients in learning how to make a revolution and in understanding the need to both avoid Stalinism and avoid support for capitalist counter-revolution against the existing deformed workers states.
End the U.S. Economic Blockades of North Korea and Cuba!
U.S. Hands off North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba! Reparations and apologies for U.S. war crimes against those countries!
For Political Revolutions in the Stalinist Deformed Workers States Defending the Socialist Planned Economies and Bringing Workers Democracy; For Socialist Revolutions against Capitalism and Imperialism to bring Socialism and Democracy to the Rest of the World!
For a New October Revolutions Across the Globe Including in the United States! Learn How it was Done, Study the October 1917 Russian Revolution!
For more on the Russian Revolution Read:
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/
At the outbreak of the war Russia was a backward semi-feudal empire ruled by a Tsar where vicious repression, exploitation, and grinding poverty ruled over the lives of the working class and small peasantry. The Russian Orthodox Church taught hatred of the Jews and the Tsarist monarchy routinely helped whip-up pogroms that terrorized and murdered Jews. Likewise, the Russian Empire contained many nationalities whose national sovereignty and languages were outlawed. Lenin called it a prison house of nations. Women’s and homosexual rights were non-existent.
It was the victims of this system who the Tsar sent to the front lines to fight and die for his empire. Yet, all did not go as planned. As happened in a number of other front lines across Europe, the war broke down as soldiers on both sides refused to fight. The agitation of revolutionary socialists within the ranks of the different militaries played a major role in this happening. Many soldiers came to understand that whatever their nationality, they had more in common with each other than they did with the Tsar, Kaiser, King, or President who had sent them to kill each other. Hundreds of miles of Germany’s western front stopped fighting and had to be replaced with new soldiers on both sides in order to get people to start killing each other again. The Russian soldiers, however, took this resistance to the war a step further and went back to overthrow the government that had sent them to fight and die. The Russian Revolution was, in fact, the most successful anti-war movement in world history.
The Russian Revolution went through two stages in 1917. The first, led by the social democratic Mensheviks happened in February, so became called the February Revolution. Almost nothing really improved under the Mensheviks. They started the war back up with Germany, reinstated the shooting of deserters at the front, and, among other things, opposed a needed sweeping land reform for the poor peasantry and a socialization of industry needed for the working class and society as a whole. The Mensheviks, through a program that claimed it was too early for a socialist revolution in Russia, carried out backward pro-capitalist policies.
These Mensheviks, opposed to the leftist agenda of the Bolsheviks, almost lost power in August 1917 due to a rightwing military coup led by General Kornilov. At that point, the survival of the revolution depended, in part, on critical military support from the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks saw this as only a temporary alliance, seeing the critical need to defeat Kornilov, but they also used the situation to arm the working class both to fight against the far right and to prepare for the struggles to come against the Menshevik Kerensky government.
Through patiently winning the working class to their side and military preparations, the Bolsheviks led the workers and peasants to power in a second revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution. This was a revolution that fulfilled its promises. The Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky ended Russia's involvement in the inter-imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, brought about a sweeping land reform for the peasants, abolished capitalism and created a socialist system that was capable of turning one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of smashing Nazi Germany and rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions to provide everyone with a guaranteed job, housing, education, and health care, brought national rights to oppressed minorities forming republics of ethnic regions, legalizing their languages and providing education in those languages while also giving their economies special help through the planned economy, brought about big advances in women's rights and rights for homosexuals, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.
Naturally, workers around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution. Internationally the Russian Revolution helped produce a movement that broke away from the opportunist and pro-capitalist Social Democratic socialist parties who supported their own bourgeoisies in the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I and who murdered Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany for their revolutionary opposition to the war and capitalism.
In the United States an important Communist Party was formed out of a split from the reformist Socialist Party of America. That Communist Party, along with the Trotskyist movement that later split off from it, went on to become important leaders in the labor movement of the 1930s, including the ground breaking 1934 Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, and in the formation of the militant industrial CIO union, all of which forced the Roosevelt administration to make some big reforms in favor of the working class which included Social Security, a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, the 40 hour work week and overtime, the outlawing of child labor, and the Works Progress Administration which created two million jobs for the unemployed. The motivation of the ruling class to carry out these programs was to preserve the capitalist system in the face of mass working class and socialist resistance. Before there was militant communist leadership in the unions the working class was mostly just getting its ass kicked, as we are once again today for the same reasons of lacking militant communist leadership. All revolutionary communists and labor militants should study how the communist movement was able to lead strikes and win in the 1930s.
Lenin’s program for the liberation of oppressed nations and races also had a profound effect on the American socialist movement. Before the Russian Revolution, much of the American socialist movement was oblivious to the oppression of blacks. There was a so-called “color-blind” policy in the Socialist Party of America, summed up by Eugene Debs when he said “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.... The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color.” Even worse, other socialists like Victor Berger were openly racist. It was the inspiration of the October Russian Revolution and Lenin's program on special oppression that made American socialists see, in the newly established communist movement, that blacks were doubly exploited and oppressed and that a program of special demands was needed to address black oppression.
Of the role of the USSR, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon later wrote:
“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow – after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races – for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”
Before the movement against Jim Crow segregation had successes, one thinks of the semi-fascist rule of the KKK and Democrat Party in the south. Yet the Communist Party was able to organize a May Day celebration of 20,000 people in Montgomery Alabama in the 1930s. The opening lines of their flyer declared:
“The Birmingham bosses are trying to make slaves of us! They are taking the bread from our mouths! They cut our relief and starve us. They refuse to let us organize as we wish. They refuse to recognize our unions! They persecute and lynch the Negro people! They treat their dogs better than they do the workers!”
The Communist Party had grown in popularity in the south largely due to their struggles for Black freedom with many Blacks joining the party. One of the most famous of the struggles they led was that for Scottsboro Nine. This case, out of Scottsboro, Alabama, was an attempt to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law “justice”. As a result, the Scottsboro youths were not executed, but instead were given long prison sentences. The last defendant was not pardoned until 1976.
Likewise today, it is largely groups who draw our inspiration in part from the Russian Revolution and the early communist movement in America that have campaigned to abolish the racist death penalty and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a result, the movement to free Mumia has forced the state to back down on their attempts to murder him. He does, however, unjustly continue to sit in an American prison hell-hole.
Just as human rights are illusive in the United States, with the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, numerous unjustly charged and prosecuted occupy protesters, and many others, U.S. concerns internationally have nothing to do with human rights either. As Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, U.S. opposition to Castro and support for capitalist butchers like the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship that ruled Cuba before the Cuban Revolution, is based on the economic interests of U.S. imperialism:
“...while the media is most often used as a megaphone to amplify and project the voices of the wealthy and politically powerful, rarely does this same media honestly inform Americans of contemporary history. Because of this, millions of Americans lack the context through with to analyze and understand the basis for confrontations between states. They’re conditioned by the press to look at complex political and social issues through the lens of simplistic personalities. Therefore we speak of ‘Castro’s Cuba’ in the same breath as ‘Saddam’s Iraq’. This is silliness. Conflicts between states are not personal, they’re economic. The US supported a brutal Batista dictatorship there for almost a decade before Cuban rebels drove the regime out. The US, which loves to boast about its ‘human rights campaign’, has supported the most brutal butchers and dictators in the world. Why? Because dictators use their police and arm forces to oppress their own people, to insure that the US had free reign of the nation’s natural resources. Is there any other reason why the US would support butchers like Batista?” — Mumia Abu Jamal 5/2/03
The Cuban revolution, despite its problems, remains a living breathing revolution that must be defended from U.S. imperialism and internal counter-revolution. The Soviet Union, however, did not survive. As Rosa Luxemburg explained:
“It is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realized in one happy act.... The socialist transformation supposes a long and stubborn struggle, in the course of which, it is quite probable the proletariat will be repulsed more than once.” — Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution” (1900)
Despite the destruction of the USSR, it is essential that revolutionaries learn from that experience just as Marx learned from the destruction of the Paris Commune. In the case of the Paris Commune, workers rose up and took control of their city in 1871, but were viciously attacked by the bourgeoisie. The working class revolution was slaughtered by the bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune was drowned in blood with 30,000 communards murdered in the initial attack and, of the 50,000 people imprisoned, many were executed. Marx saw this slaughter and understood that the workers’ revolution needs to form a workers’ government and army to smash the bourgeoisie and their government. If not, similar tragedies would be repeated.
These were lessons that the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky applied to the USSR. As Emma Goldman observed:
"The Russian experience had taught him [Shatov] that we anarchists had been the romanticists of revolution, forgetful of the cost it would entail, the frightful price the enemies of the Revolution would exact, the fiendish methods they would resort to in order to destroy its gains. One cannot fight fire and sword with only logic and justice of one’s ideal. The counterrevolutionists had combined to isolate and starve Russia, and the blockade was taking a frightful toll of human life. The [imperialist] intervention and the destruction in its wake, the numerous White attacks, costing oceans of blood, the hordes of [White military chiefs] Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich; their pogroms, bestial revenge, and the general havoc wrought had imposed on the Revolution a
warfare that its most far-sighted exponents had never dreamed about.” — Emma Goldman quoted in Paul Avrich, “The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution” (1973)
It was from this devastation that the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution was born. The roots of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR laid in the invasion of 14 imperialist armies after the October Revolution, including the United States, who also encircled the USSR and blockaded it economically, while the imperialist backed pro-Tsarist White Army wrecked havoc on the economy by burning crops, destroying factories, and committing mass murder of communists and Jews (100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone).
Despite winning the war against the White Army and imperialist invaders, most of the best communists and other workers died in the war. Bureaucrats with little or no commitment to the goals of the revolution were relied on more and more for the administration of Soviet society as a result of those deaths. That bureaucracy was further corrupted by the economic devastation of war and imperialist blockade which encouraged bureaucrats to steal simply to survive and care for their children. Stalin’s conservative leadership had its social base amongst this bureaucracy which he granted privileges above the working class. And on their behalf, Stalin used repression against the working class to prevent the re-emergence of legitimate workers’ democracy.
The destruction of the Soviet Union started with Stalin’s bloody political counter-revolution against the party of Lenin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Stalin murdered all of the original leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Alexandra Kolantai, and murdered massive numbers of supporters of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition to Stalin. Stalin's political counter-revolution entrenched the power of a conservative and privileged bureaucracy. Some of the gains of the revolution were lost with that. . Abortion was banned. Gay and Lesbian rights, which had been won with the revolution, were overturned. The rights of some nationalities were stomped on as well, such as those of the Ossetians whose Republic was established under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, but was abolished and divided between the Russian and Georgian Republics under Stalin into north and south Ossetia.
Internationally, the USSR no longer played a consistent leading role for the working class because the bureaucracy preferred a policy of sabotaging revolutions in order to gain trade from capitalist countries. In the 1930s Stalin’s policies directly sabotaged the revolutions in Spain, Germany, and China contributed to the victories of the capitalist mass murderers Franco, Hitler, and Chiang Kai-shek.
But one of several gains of the October Revolution that remained was the socialist planned economy that gave the USSR the industrial and political strength to smash Nazi Germany, a capitalist country that brought mass murder to a level of industrial production never seen before or since. The USSR rebuilt after that Nazi invasion devastated the economy and left 30 million citizens of the USSR dead. They rebuilt with a socialist economy that guaranteed everyone a job, housing, education, and health care. It was the positive side of that planned socialist economy, copied in Eastern Europe after the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, that helped inspire the working class of Western Europe to fight for social progress that included some victories, like socialized health care.
Besides smashing Nazi Germany and liberating Europe from fascism, the USSR also lent important material support to the anti-imperialist revolution by doing things like giving the Vietnamese people military aid to defeat the U.S. occupation and U.S. imposed dictatorships that ultimately murdered three million Vietnamese people. Likewise, the USSR broke the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. Not only did the USSR participate in trade with Cuba, but they also gave Cuba fairer prices for their sugar than what was offered on the international capitalist market. In Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere, in a similar way as was done with economic planning within the USSR, the planned socialist economy of the USSR was used to help advance the traditionally poorer countries of the world.
Countries supported by the USSR also advanced women’s liberation while the United States almost always did the opposite. This included U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The USSR tried to defeat U.S. imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, an intervention where billions of U.S. dollars in military aid to the religious fanatics of the mujahideen left a million people dead, toppled a pro-woman government, and put the Taliban in power. The corporate owned media of the United States continues to lie about Afghanistan; peddling the lie that Soviet intervention was an “invasion” despite the fact that the government of Afghanistan (the pro-woman, pro-literacy PDPA government) begged the USSR to send troops to try to defeat the CIA funded religious fanatics of the mujahideen. Other imperialist lies are peddled as well, including the disgusting collection of lies in the Hollywood movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” which, among other things, peddled completely discredited lies about the USSR making bombs to look like toys to blow-up children when they picked them up. Meanwhile, with the continued disastrous intervention of the U.S. imperialists in Afghanistan, the Red Cross warned in 2002 against the U.S. use of brightly colored yellow cluster bombs that appeared to look like toys and were exploding when children picked them up. As usual, the U.S. imperialists are guilty of the crimes they falsely accuse others of committing.
Likewise, the planned economy of the USSR was used to better many of the traditionally oppressed and poorer regions of the USSR by giving them favored investment and lifting them up economically including in the traditionally Muslim regions. Those regions also benefited greatly from the pro-woman / secular policies of the USSR. Nowhere else in the traditionally Muslim world were women better off than in Soviet Central Asia. Women’s access to higher education sometimes regionally produced more woman doctors than men. Compare this to the hell the U.S. created in Afghanistan with the victory of its mujahideen forces where women were stripped of all rights.
Yet, the Soviet people suffered greatly from a lack of political rights as well. After Stalin, the GULAGS that Stalin established, death camps really, were ended. Yet, the left remained unable to express their opinions if they disagreed with the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats. This included labeling political opponents insane and locking them up in mental wards. The U.S. did the same thing with “uppity” women and homosexuals up until the 1960s.
In the time of Gorbachev, the fragility of the deformed workers' state in the USSR was a political question rooted in the privileges of the ruling bureaucracy and the repression the working class had suffered for so many decades. When Yeltsin carried out his disastrous capitalist counter-revolution he created a few wealthy capitalists. At the same time he eliminated guaranteed health care, education, and employment and caused life expectancy to drop by 10 years. Unfortunately, there was not a strong enough working class movement to stop him. This was due to decades of Stalinist repression. But Yeltsin's coup d'etat was a military operation that involved his sending out troops to shoot at protesters and those in the government opposed his coup. It was a counter-revolution led by bureaucrats who thought they could get rich under a capitalist system.
Legitimate Trotskyists opposed Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution as the disaster it was and instead advocated political revolution to defend the socialist planned economy while at the same time sweeping away the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and creating a workers democracy. In the United States we need to both sweep away the capitalist system and create a workers democracy to change a society where the government and economy are presently run strictly by and for the wealthy.
Stalin’s political legacy in the United States includes a fear of socialist revolution. No honest person can see his mass murder and repression attractive. Trotskyists and other left socialists who oppose Stalinism argue that we can have a much much better world if we fight for a system that has both the benefits of socialism and of workers’ democracy.
One of Stalin’s main organizational legacies in the United States is the Communist Party (CPUSA). Their support for the Democrats was Stalin’s policy. That policy, started by Stalin, went against the long proud history of the American working class movement in opposing both the Democrats and Republicans. It went against the policies of both the early Socialist Party and the Communist Party of the United States before Stalin. From Gorbachev to Stalin, that policy of supporting Democrats was never corrected in those many decades while the CPUSA dutifully followed the line given by Moscow. After Stalin’s death, the conservative and repressive bureaucratic caste that Stalin put in power in the USSR by murdering the original leaders of the Russian Revolution actually maintained most of Stalin’s policies, despite denouncing Stalin. That’s why Trotskyists continued to call them and their world followers “Stalinist”.
The Communist Party –USA in the 1980s quit running candidates in order to put their full support behind the Democrats. Politically, left parties like the Communist Party who give their support to the Democrats are only serving to give left cover to the enemies of the working class. Yes, the CPUSA is part of the workers movement and has done some good things, like lead the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. But decades of Stalinist leadership has turned them useless on most questions of labor. They even supported the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) bureaucracy attacks on the militant Hormel Meatpackers of Local P-9 in the 1980s while also supporting Democratic governor Rudy Perpich who sent out the National Guard against the workers.
The Democrats and Republicans are playing a giant game of good cop bad cop with the working class, with Obama being extremely bad but the Republican candidates scaring people into supporting Democrats. Both parties are working together and financed by the same capitalists. Both parties are the paid agents of Wall Street, the banks, oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, austerity, unemployment, repression, student debt, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on climate change. Without organization around a political program that directly challenges the Democrats and Republicans, power will remain in the hands of the capitalists and their two parties. Even “progressive” reforms will remain elusive without a real challenge to their power. It will take a revolutionary party with a Trotskyist program to build the leadership needed to overthrow this system. Likewise, it is likely to take the same to be powerful enough to win any meaningful reforms.
From the propaganda of the U.S. corporate media the lesson of the USSR is that that it “didn’t work” and that all revolutions are similarly doomed. Yet, the only healthy socialist revolution that ever degenerated into Stalinism was the USSR. Every other socialist revolution since has not degenerated, but was instead deformed form birth under Stalinist leadership and the command structure of a guerrilla army that was transformed into the government after taking power (south Vietnam (1975), Cuba (1959), north Vietnam (1954) China (1949), and Yugoslavia (1945)) or under the direct control of Stalin’s Red Army after defeating Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan (1945 - North Korea, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). Each of these revolutions was an improvement in overthrowing capitalist dictatorships, ending the exploitation and control of imperialist capitalist nations, implementing socialist economies, greatly improving women’s rights, and in general meeting human needs like health care, education, nutrition, employment, and housing. China, for instance, doubled life expectancy during Mao’s rule saving the lives of some 408 million people.
But these countries never had workers’ democracies. For instance, Ho Chi Minh murdered thousands of Trotskyists who were also being targeted by the French at the same time. Immediately after taking power, Mao rounded-up all of the known Trotskyists and their friends and families and put them in prison. This was pure Stalinism. No inference of healthy revolutions always degenerating can be drawn from these Stalinist led revolutions. These revolutions didn’t degenerate, they were deformed from birth.
Regarding the existing Stalinist deformed workers’ states of Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea, Trotskyists call for an end to imperialist economic blockades and for the defense of the socialist planned economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution, while at the same time supporting political revolution to overthrow the brutal Stalinist bureaucracies and their privileges in order to bring workers’ democracy. In fact, more and more, in the existing deformed workers states it will take a political revolution to defend what is left of the socialist planned economies from the privatization led by Stalinist bureaucrats.
Trotskyists defended (and defend) the gains of those revolutions from imperialist attacks, including opposing the U.S. economic blockades against North Korea and Cuba and denouncing threats of war against those countries. Still, under our program, Trotskyists support legitimate working class and student uprisings that could produce socialist systems with workers democracy. Historically this has included Trotskyist support for the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring, and the Tiananmen Square uprising of the 1980s. In each case the Stalinists oppressed legitimate working class demands. There are, in fact, rivers of blood between the positions of Trotskyists and Stalinists on those questions, just as there are rivers of blood in the millions of people Stalin murdered, largely to eliminate the Trotskyist left opposition to his rule. Yes, the imperialists have murdered more than the Stalinists, but there are still rivers of blood differentiating Trotskyism from Stalinism.
Stalinist groups in the United States, like the CP, PSL, and WWP, do not have a position in support of political revolution in the Stalinist controlled states. This is why they supported the Chinese government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square and supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary even though neither uprising was pro-capitalist. Those working class and student uprisings represented hopes for truly socialist systems that would include workers’ democracy. Instead, the CP / PSL / WWP took the side of the Stalinist oppressors. That doesn’t speak well to their visions of socialism. Nor does it speak well to the position they would take if there were similar uprisings against the few remaining Stalinist governments today.
As opposed to Stalinist models, true workers’ democracy includes freedom to form political parties just as long as they don’t get foreign funding and don’t take up arms against the revolution, freedom of the workers’ controlled media, subsidies for any working class press or other media that meet a certain readership criteria, and authentic elections controlled by the working class majority.
Some other nominally “Trotskyist” groups like the ISO, SO, SWP, and Socialist Action have gone to the other end of the extreme, abandoning Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union (which legitimate Trotskyists have applied to other deformed workers states). Trotsky’s defense was clearly one against internal counter-revolution and imperialist attack. Yet all of those groups supported one or more of the following openly counter-revolutionary and imperialist backed movements including the U.S. funded woman hating mujahideen in Afghanistan, the pro-capitalist and CIA backed Solidarnosc movement in Poland that came to power and outlawed abortion and brought unemployment from zero to 50% by eliminating the socialist economy, and Yeltsin’s capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR that reduced life expectancy by 10 years. As these nominally Trotskyist groups moved away from defending living revolutions from capitalist counter-revolution and imperialist war, they have also in general abandoned advocacy of socialist revolution in the United States. Instead, they tend to see themselves much more as protest pressure groups that prefer anti-communist attempts at sounding legitimate in the court of bourgeois public opinion as opposed to telling the people the truth.
Yet, only socialist revolution will solve society’s problems and save the Earth from the environmental catastrophe of climate change. Study of the Russian Revolution and Paris Commune remain essential ingredients in learning how to make a revolution and in understanding the need to both avoid Stalinism and avoid support for capitalist counter-revolution against the existing deformed workers states.
End the U.S. Economic Blockades of North Korea and Cuba!
U.S. Hands off North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba! Reparations and apologies for U.S. war crimes against those countries!
For Political Revolutions in the Stalinist Deformed Workers States Defending the Socialist Planned Economies and Bringing Workers Democracy; For Socialist Revolutions against Capitalism and Imperialism to bring Socialism and Democracy to the Rest of the World!
For a New October Revolutions Across the Globe Including in the United States! Learn How it was Done, Study the October 1917 Russian Revolution!
For more on the Russian Revolution Read:
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
